Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism

Summary

The "Second Sophistic" traditionally refers to a period at the height of the Roman Empire’s power that witnessed a flourishing of Greek rhetoric and oratory, and since the 19th century it has often been viewed as a defense of Hellenic civilization against the domination of Rome. This book proposes a very different model. Covering popular fiction, poetry and Greco-Jewish material, it argues for a rich, dynamic, and diverse culture, which cannot be reduced to a simple model of continuity. Shining new light on a series of playful, imaginative texts that are left out of the traditional accounts of Greek literature, Whitmarsh models a more adventurous, exploratory approach to later Greek culture. Beyond the Second Sophistic offers not only a new way of looking at Greek literature from 300 BCE onwards, but also a challenge to the Eurocentric, aristocratic constructions placed on the Greek heritage. Accessible and lively, it will appeal to students and scholars of Greek literature and culture, Hellenistic Judaism, world literature, and cultural theory.

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Beyond the Second Sophistic - Tim Whitmarsh

Introduction

Beyond the Second Sophistic and into the Postclassical

This book represents a series of experiments in alternative ways of thinking about ancient Greek literature, which I shall identify by the term (to which I lay no exclusive claim) postclassicism.¹ With this neologism I mean, principally, to mark an aspiration to rethink classicist categories inherited from the nineteenth century. It is not intended to proclaim any sharp rupture with existing theories and practices within the discipline, for clearly there are many theoretically informed approaches (literary and cultural theory, feminism, reception, Marxism, postcolonialism, queer theory . . .) that share in that labor of reconstructing the humanities legacy, but it seems to me that finding a progressive label that is specific to classical literary studies should be a useful reminder that (despite what is sometimes claimed) battle lines are still drawn up fiercely around the study of ancient texts.

Postclassicism is not, however, merely a matter of updating political and ethical mores. Classics as a discipline was, for sure, more than most humanities subjects forged in the white heat of imperialist, nationalist, elitist, disciplinarian, androcentric imperatives, but collective self-congratulation on our liberal progressiveness is lazy and too easy. Rather, what I aim to do in this book is attack some of the conventional ways of categorizing literature, all of which are to some extent rooted in nineteenth-century, postromantic ideas of classical value. Classicists’ organization of literary history has tended to be dominated by an unspoken aesthetic that places certain kinds of texts in the center and hence privileges certain kinds of narratives of what the Greeks thought. It is at this kind of assumption, most of all, that this book takes aim. The literary production of the ancient Greeks (and others) is understood here not in terms of an intrinsic worth that is to be adulated—for value only ever indicates what the buyer is willing to pay—but as a plural cultural system. Despite the ever-increasing sophistication of our strategies for reading individual texts, classicists in general still seem to cling to unreconstructed narratives that privilege early Greece as a site of cultural, intellectual, and indeed religious purity. This creates a historical matrix that not only overaestheticizes material from the early period (particularly the tough, manly stuff: Homer, Pindar, and Aeschylus) but also dooms later literary traditions to being comprehended in terms only of replication and emulation of prior glories. This assessment, it seems to me, works only if we ignore the majority of the surviving evidence.

Any area of classical culture can be considered from a postclassical vantage. There are, of course, brilliantly innovative readings of (for example) Sappho and Herodotus that reshape our ideas about literary history. This book, however, focuses on literary texts that are also chronologically postclassical. All are located somewhere on that slippery slope toward decadence that (so some might argue) began in the aftermath of the fourth century B.C.E. I choose this material not just because it has been understudied relative to earlier texts (true though that is) but also because it offers the best opportunities for confronting the larger questions of historical change, linear versus plural traditions, and cultural conflict.

The material I consider, moreover, will (I hope) challenge many readers’ ideas about what counts as Greek literature. Some of it was written by Egyptians or Jews. Some of it is subliterary. Some of it, for sure, fits a more conventional template of Greek literature, but in those cases the disruption comes in in different ways. The range is designedly diverse, cutting as it does across temporal, cultural, and generic boundaries, precisely to pose sharp questions about how and why we think of Greek literary history in the way that we do. It is not my aim, let me make clear, simply to erase all the contours and lineaments that give shape and meaning to our maps of postclassical Greek culture; rather, I wish to demonstrate (i) how these intellectual frameworks can constrict as well as enable our thinking; (ii) how much more richness and variety there is to the postclassical world than conventional accounts suggest; and (iii) a more general point of methodology, on which I wish to insist. Boundaries should be seen not as barriers, the limits of our inquiry—but as crossing points, the spaces that prompt the most interesting questions. This is the nub of postclassicism as methodology: think not of the well-wrought urn but of the working of it, its breaking, its contents, its storage, the points of juncture between it and abutting objects.

Much of my work over the past fifteen years or so has focused on Greek literature of the time of the Roman Empire, roughly 50–300 C.E., a period that is sometimes known as the Second Sophistic. I have inveighed against the inaccuracies and (more importantly) blighted history of this term on a number of occasions,² but at the risk of trying patiences let me return to the question here, for it offers a nice illustration of the general problematics sketched above and gets us to the very heart of the postclassical project. It is not the term Second Sophistic itself that is the problem—all terminology has limitations as well as advantages—but the way that unexamined adherence to nineteenth-century categories can still blinker us now. The phrase is first found in the third-century C.E. Greek writer Philostratus, where it denotes a particular oratorical style; since its reappropriation in the late nineteenth century, however, it has been associated with a supposed Hellenic revivalism calqued on the model of postindustrial nationalism.³ Erwin Rohde’s zweite Sophistik was imagined as a reassertion of a national Hellenic element in the face of a double threat to identity, from both orientals and Rome.⁴ (Rohde, a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, was preoccupied with questions of cultural vigor in his own era too.) More recent scholarship has, perhaps understandably, preferred to speak in anthropological terms of Greek culture or cultural identity rather than nationality.⁵ But culture too is a tricky word, and arguably even more problematic: it not only risks simply repackaging the old product (that is, committing to the same metaphysics of unbroken, linear continuity)⁶ but also tacitly activates the idea of a Jaegerian model of idealized aristocratic solidarity (Greek literature as high culture). Nationalism through the back door, in other words. The Second Sophistic has been—and remains in much current scholarship—a modern fantasy projected back on to the ancient world, an objet petit a, an impossible idealization of pure, untainted aristocratic Greek tradition.

Now, it is of course not hard to find expressions of aristocratic Hellenocentrism in the postclassical Greek world. My argument, however, is that such expressions should be seen as local and tactical rather than as absolute paradigms of the spirit of the age. The enthusiasm with which classicists have embraced Plutarch,⁷ for instance, should give us pause: an extraordinarily rich and varied author, to be sure, but also one who shapes (or has been taken to shape)⁸ a very conservative vision of Greek identity in terms of a dialogue with the classical greats, particularly the nonfictional prose authors. If we take Plutarch as paradigmatic of postclassical Greece, we miss so many dimensions of Greek writing: lateral engagement with other peoples’ cultures, poetics and imaginative literature, the continuity with Hellenistic Greek culture. Much the same could be said of Dio Chrysostom and Aelius Aristides, both of whom loom large in the standard accounts of Greek identity in the Roman Empire. I am not, of course, arguing against their value for cultural historians, merely observing that selecting a limited evidentiary range leads to oversimplified claims about the Greeks and the Roman Empire.⁹

This picture of seamless panhellenism is, ultimately, a scholarly fiction, resting on a circular process of exclusion of evidence to the contrary. Standard accounts of postclassical Greek literature (I include my own earlier work) have, for example, little room for Jewish¹⁰ or Christian literature (although here the tide is beginning to turn).¹¹ They scarcely acknowledge the competitor traditions that were contemporaneously devising, reimagining, and commentating on literary canons (viz. rabbinical Hebrew¹² and Christian Syriac). They present the Hellenistic era as dominated by poetry and the imperial era by prose, usually by simply failing to refer to the full range of surviving material. Nor do they accommodate much demographic range within mainstream Greek society. It is rare to find mention of paraliterary works such as the Alexander Romance or the Life of Aesop, whose strata range from Hellenistic to imperial dates, or, indeed, of the so-called Acts of the Pagan Martyrs or Secundus the Silent Philosopher, works that clearly operate at some considerable remove from the Atticizing classicism of Aristides or Philostratus. We should note too the relative marginalization of the voluminous technical literature of the later era.¹³ While the physiognomical works of Galen (antiquity’s most productive author, to judge by what we have) and Polemo have to an extent been brought into the fold,¹⁴ little awareness is shown of—to take but a few examples—Hero of Alexandria on mechanics, Apollonius Dyscolus the grammarian, Aristides Quintilianus on musicology, Aelian on animals,¹⁵ astrologers, or alchemists. No wonder the stereotype of imperial Greeks as flouncy, elitist orators persists, when texts that present an alternative image are not pictured. How different our conception of the period would be had Philostratus not survived.

It is clearly beyond the scope of a single volume to survey the full range of postclassical literary production, and this in any case is not my aim here.¹⁶ That being said, there is certainly a primary intention to expand the range of material that scholars of the Hellenistic and early imperial periods have traditionally covered. Part 1 treats Greek fiction proposing that the span extends well beyond the Greek novel (or romance) as conventionally understood—that is, the works of Chariton, Achilles Tatius, and so forth. These, I argue in chapter 2, represent a very limited window onto the world of ancient fictional production, and indeed they play by very different rules than those of the generality of novelistic literature. My wider narrative of prose fiction begins early in the Hellenistic era, with Euhemerus (sometime after 300 B.C.E.), and gives a central berth to a series of texts too often relegated to the fringe:¹⁷ the Alexander Romance, the pseudo-Lucianic Ass, Philostratus’s Heroicus, and even the literary-critical writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Part 2 attempts to remedy the general neglect of poetics in the scholarship of the early imperial period (a neglect that is certainly prompted by certain ancient sources themselves, which diagnose the imperial era as a prosaic one: see chapter 12). There are signs here and there that the corner is being turned,¹⁸ albeit slowly, but even so the emphasis is too often placed on subordinating poetics to a supposed context where rhetorical prose dominates, rather than reading the material on its own terms, as poetry. My chapters on the early imperial epigrammatists (chapter 9), Mesomedes (chapter 10), and Lucian’s paratragedies (chapter 11) seek to show how these cunning poems resonate against both the rich tradition of classical poetics and contemporary culture. Part 3 marks the end of the book’s adventures, in Hellenistic Judaism: Ezekiel’s tragic retelling of the Exodus story (chapter 13) and the various attempts to integrate the biblical and the Homeric traditions (chapter 14). This material is unusually rich and sophisticated, and with its concern to root a distinct identity politics in the revivifying and transforming of an ancient literary culture it can be said to preempt many of the concerns of the Greek Sophists of the early Roman Empire.

As will be clear, this book does more than simply expand the canon. My aim is to do away entirely with the idea of the culturally central, the paradigmatic, to dispense with hierarchies of cultural value. The Jewish epic poets Theodotus and Philo may be fragmentary, for example, and may not have spawned an entire tradition of Jewish epic poetics (although perhaps they did? We have lost so much Jewish literature of the era), but to me they are potentially as significant in cultural terms as Vergil. I say potentially because thinking more pluralistically involves a hypothetical rewiring of literary history: let us bracket the subsequent reception that made Vergil (in T.S. Eliot’s famous phrase) the classic of all Europe and Philo and Theodotus footnotes in literary history; let us recall instead that when each of these poets wrote, the future was entirely up for grabs. Philo and Theodotus did not know that Jerusalem would be sacked in 70 C.E. and that Judaism would as a result turn its back on the Greco-Roman tradition: for all they knew, they were composing poems that might change the world. This kind of utopian (or, better, uchronic) intellectual experiment with literary history seeks not only to unsettle our deeply embedded metanarratives of classical value but also to restore some of the local vitality, urgency, and conflict that is endemic to all literary production.

Issues of centrality and marginality cluster particularly around fiction and the novel, which is why part 1 focuses on this area. The issue here is not just the familiar one that the Greeks themselves apparently set little store by fictional production; it is, more pertinently, that there is a hierarchy of sorts among the novels themselves. The five romances of Chariton, Xenophon, Achilles, Longus, and Heliodorus seem to work together as a unit and hence as a bullyboy gang excluding all those that do not fit. Scholars, however, have been too easily magnetized by the imperial romances’ apparent generic coherence, so that we tend to read other prose fictions in terms primarily of their deviation from the romance paradigm (see chapters 1–2). The imperial romances do indeed work as a genre, but I propose that this sense of shared form coalesced only partially, gradually, and in a sense retrospectively: thus the first-century Callirhoe became a romance as we understand the term (that is, a participant in the genre) only as a result of the later formation of a tradition. We need a much more plural model of what Greek fiction is and was, a model that includes works such as the pseudo-Lucianic Ass, the Alexander Romance, and Philostratus’s Heroicus.

The book’s second major theme, already adverted to above, is that poetry gives us a very different point of entry into the world of the Greeks under the Roman Empire. Perhaps surprisingly, much of the poetry is written from below: whereas prose authors tend to project their relationship with empire in terms of parity—a projection that feeds the nineteenth-century preoccupation with noble Greeks preserving their cultural traditions—poets mobilize a stock of topoi, drawn from patronal poets such as Pindar, Bacchylides, and Theocritus, that emphasize a difference of status. Poets do not necessarily give us a truer picture of Greeks’ feelings about Rome: these we will never know. But they do capture a different facet of that relationship, where the hierarchy and exploitation are much more visible.

The third thematic locus is Hellenistic Judaism. Literary classicists have in general neglected material that is not perceived to be echt Greek; the lionization of Lucian, the Hellenized Syrian of the second century C.E., is the exception (but Lucian plays almost entirely by classical rules, apart, perhaps, for in On the Syrian Goddess). The reasons for this are in many ways understandable. We have lost entire cultural traditions: Greco-Phoenician culture is in effect represented only by Philo of Byblos, who is himself excerpted in Eusebius; likewise Greco-Mesopotamian literature, where Berossus survives (again) primarily in Eusebius’s paraphrase. Demotic Egyptian texts do survive (usually in fragments), and there were clearly numerous points of cultural contact between Egyptian and Hellenistic Greek culture, but the material is difficult to work with, given how much primary editorial work remains to be done.¹⁹ With Second Temple Jewish literature, however, we have (thanks to late-antique Christians, who treated biblical matter with predictable reverence) a rich, albeit incomplete, body of literature: it presents classicists with a wonderful opportunity to test the ways in which sophisticated Greek speakers deployed the traditional Greek forms of tragedy and epic as vehicles for non-Greek narrative traditions. These texts, indeed, seem to preempt much of the ingenious play with issues of identity, self-fashioning, and cultural bivalence that scholars have detected in the Second Sophistic. It may be a provocation, but it is no exaggeration to speak of a Jewish Sophistic already in the second and first centuries B.C.E.

There are other threads running through this book: the figure of metalepsis, the (dis)appearances of authors, the intersection between literary production and literary criticism, and my unflagging preoccupation with the power of the human imagination to transform. These are best left to emerge organically, in the reading. This book was, as I have said, conceived in an adventurous spirit; there are many alternative tracks and trails for off-roaders. With that same desire for openness and accessibility, I have kept the endnoting relatively light and used Greek letters only where they have seemed impossible to avoid (and only in endnotes). I hope the writing is accessible to nonspecialists.

1. I have benefited from rich and ongoing discussions with Brooke Holmes and Constanze Güthenke of Princeton University, and from contributors to the Postclassicisms seminar at Oxford in the autumn of 2012.

2. See especially Whitmarsh 2001, 42–45; 2005a, 4–10.

3. Philostr., VS 481, 507; see, e.g., Rohde 1876, which is in part a polemic against the hypothesis of Eastern influence on the development of the Greek novel. On the nationalist, and arguably anti-Semitic, context of Rohde’s work, see Whitmarsh 2011b.

4. Rohde 1914, 310–23, at 319.

5. So Swain 1996, Whitmarsh 2001, and Goldhill 2001b.

6. See the pertinent critique of McCoskey 2012, 93.

7. Witness the success of the International Plutarch Society, its multiple publications, and its journal, Ploutarchos. Let me stress that reflection on the phenomenon does not imply any criticism of this fine institution or its wonderful members!

8. As ever, such generalizations risk oversimplifying. There is much more that could be said about Plutarch’s multifaceted relationship with non-Greek cultures, particularly Roman. His (surely ironic) claim to know minimal Latin (Demosthenes 2, carefully unpacked by Zadorojnyi 2006) has been given far too much prominence, at the expense of such extraordinarily hybridized texts as On the Fortune of the Romans and the Roman Questions. Strobach 1997 opens up these questions interestingly.

9. A case in point is Veyne 2005, 195–310, magisterial but largely unencumbered by awareness of the voluminous scholarship on the complexity of Greek identity, and hence prone to unsustainable generalization (e.g., p. 238: The Greeks are tacitly considered, in the Roman Empire, as foreigners. The Greeks equally considered themselves superior, which is why their identity remained irreducible).

10. Goldhill 2001b is an exception, containing an excellent essay by Maud Gleason on Josephus.

11. König 2009 is exemplary in this regard; see also, from the side of Christian studies, especially Lieu 2004, Nasrallah 2010 (with 28–30 specifically on this issue), and now Perkins 2010 and Eshleman 2012.

13. König and Whitmarsh 2007 represents an attempt to bridge this particular gap.

14. Galen receives a chapter in Bowersock 1969; see further Gill, Whitmarsh, and Wilkins 2009. Gleason 1995, 55–81, situates Polemo’s Physiognomics within rhetorical agonistics; for a fuller discussion of this question see Swain 2007.

15. A deficit that Steven Smith will correct in an eagerly anticipated study.

16. For an excellent survey of Hellenistic literature that adopts a more pluralistic perspective see Cuypers and Clauss 2010; the forthcoming Cambridge History of Later Greek Literature, edited by Robert Shorrock, promises to be a milestone.

17. The phrase used and explored in Karla 2009.

18. See especially Baumbach and Bär 2007, on Quintus of Smyrna and the Second Sophistic.

19. Whitmarsh and Thomson, forthcoming, covers much of this Hellenistic intercultural material.

PART ONE

Fiction beyond the Canon

1

The Invention of Fiction

Invention is one of the central tropes of classical, particularly Greek, scholarship: it seems that even in this methodologically hyperaware, post-postmodern age, we are still addicted to romanticizing narratives of origination (however contested). When it comes to the (discrete but interlocking) categories of fiction, prose literature, and the novel, recent years have seen originomania in overdrive. Can we attribute to Chariton, in the first century C.E., the invention of the Greek love novel?¹ Or was Theocritus responsible for the invention of fiction?² Or was it rather a question of the birth of literary fiction, thanks to philosophical innovations culminating in Plato and Aristotle?³ Or is die Entdeckung der Fiktionalität⁴ perhaps to be attributed to the development of relatively widespread literacy, in the fifth century B.C.E.? Yet a sense of fictionality has already been credited, by different scholars, to the poetry of Homer and Hesiod.⁵ The invention of Greek prose, meanwhile, might be sought in stories around and reflections on the figure of Aesop, which for us surface to visibility in the fifth century B.C.E.⁶ Clearly at one level these are merely rhetorical claims, façons de parler: few scholars, I imagine, would if pressed argue that fiction, the novel, or literary prose was actually invented, definitively, at a specific historical juncture. Partly because these are our categories, not those of the Greeks or the Romans, ancient ones map only inexactly onto them. It makes no more sense to ask when in antiquity fiction was invented than economics,stress management, or technology. More than this, however, fiction is a cultural universal, and storytelling is an intuitive human activity; all cultures have, and always have had, a developed sense of the power of fictive creativity. All literature is to an extent fictional. Its social and aesthetic role may shift at different times, as may the manner of its presentation, but there is—I suggest—never a point in any culture’s history when fiction is yet to be invented.

At the same time, however, literature does have its own history, and certain practices and constructions come into (and indeed out of) focus at certain times. Literary history, moreover, is not simply about the discovery of new techniques, genres, or conceptual apparatuses; it also has an embodied, physical, institutional history. For example, in the Greek world, shifting conceptions of literature are bound up with the changing relationship between orality and the book,⁷ with the emergence of an archival culture in Hellenistic Alexandria (building on foundations laid in Athens), and with wider shifts in the political culture of the Greek world.⁸ So while, as we have said, fiction is not invented like the process of uranium enrichment or discovered like the moons of Jupiter, it should be possible to track its changing inflection throughout Greek literary history.

In this chapter, I aim to describe how prose fiction emerged as a marked category through the classical and Hellenistic periods. In so doing, I am deliberately avoiding the familiar questing after the precursors of the Greek novel. The novel as conventionally understood—that is to say, the romance form as practiced by Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, Heliodorus, and various fragmentary writers—is almost certainly a product entirely of Roman times.⁹ The formative work of modern scholarship on Greek prose fiction—still subtly influential—was Erwin Rohde’s Der griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer (The Greek novel and its forerunners), first published in 1876.¹⁰ Rohde’s interest lay primarily in the imperial romance, a phenomenon he sought to explain by revealing its forerunners in the Hellenistic period: principally erotic poetry and prose travel narrative. The novel, in his view, was the hybrid offspring of these two Hellenistic forms. Rohde’s work inspired a number of other attempts to locate the origins of the imperial romance,¹¹ but in general this kind of evolutionary narrative has fallen out of favor.¹² There are, however, two consequences of his argument that are still with us. The first is a general reluctance to consider Hellenistic prose narrative on its own terms. Despite a number of studies of individual works,¹³ scholars of ancient fiction have generally been too fixated on the paradigm of the imperial romance to acknowledge the existence of any culture of Hellenistic fiction. If, however, we cease to view Hellenistic prose culture teleologically—that is to say, simply as a stepping stone en route to the novel—then we can begin to appreciate a much more vibrant, dynamic story world, which we can understand on its own terms. As we shall see below, there are indeed elements of continuity between Hellenistic prose and the imperial romance, but the novel also marks a real break from its Hellenistic predecessors (see particularly chapter 2).¹⁴

The second fallacy I wish to identify is the belief that Greek culture was insulated from non-Greek influence. A veiled racism drives Rohde’s project, which seeks to defend the novel against the charge (as he saw it) of Eastern influence; like his friend Friedrich Nietzsche, he was keen to distinguish the idealized Greek Geist from the corrupting effects of the East, which culminated in the success of Christianity. What hidden sources, he asks programmatically (but, it turns out, ironically), produced in Greece this most un-Greek of forms?¹⁵ The identification of echt Hellenistic precursors allows him to preserve the Greekness of this superficially un-Greek form. Of course, few nowadays would formulate their views like this. Nevertheless, scholars of Greek tend (understandably) to emphasize Greek sources and hence tacitly to exclude the possibility of cultural fusion.

This chapter is principally designed to contest both these assumptions. The first half argues against the retrojection of anachronistic concepts of fiction, proposing that we should instead look for challenges to dominant modes of narrative authority (conveyed particularly through the genres of epic and history). The second claims that frictions both within Greek culture and between Greek and other cultures energized Hellenistic narrative.

ANCIENT FICTION?

The category of fiction is not only philosophically complex but also culture specific: each society, in each historical phase, has its own way of conceptualizing narratives that are accepted as not literally true but as vehicles for a kind of moral or cultural truth. Fiction, as I see it, is not a linguistic pathology but primarily and most fundamentally a way of expressing a culture’s view of the logic of the cosmos in narrative form;¹⁶ it is, hence, responsive to changing ideas around the nature of the cosmos and humanity’s place within it.

Although eternally aware of the potentially fictive properties of all discourse, Greeks only rarely acknowledged fiction as a genre: partial exceptions can be found in forms of rhetoric and New Comedy (discussed below), but it was not until the emergence of the novel in the imperial period that one particular literary form became definitively fictive.¹⁷ In the Archaic, classical, and Hellenistic periods, on the other hand, literary fictions were rather communicated through established narrative forms that hovered ambiguously between truth and falsehood.

From the earliest times it was accepted that poetry could mislead as well as pronounce authoritatively. Hesiod’s Muses know how to tell lies like the truth, as well as the truth (Theogony 27). A similar phrase is used of Homer’s Odysseus (Odyssey 19.203), who prefaces his narration to the Phaeacians with a reminder that he is famous among all for my deceptions (9.19–20). Lyric poetry from Archilochus to Pindar is also full of reflections upon the truth status of stories and myths.¹⁸

The fifth century, however, saw a set of cultural developments that increased consciousness of fictitious narrative.¹⁹ When drama emerged as a major form in the fifth century, it too became a prime site for exploring questions of truth and fiction. The Sicilian Sophist Gorgias famously claimed that in tragedy the deceiver is more just than the nondeceiver, and the deceived wiser than the undeceived (fr. 23 DK). Drama also presents the earliest examples of what critics would later call plasmatic narrative: that is to say, stories based on neither historical nor mythical but on invented characters and events.²⁰ This kind of plot can be found in mime and even occasionally in tragedy (see, e.g., Arist., Poet. 1451b), but is most prominent in comedy. Old Comedy often blends real figures (e.g., Cratinus’s Pericles or Aristophanes’s Cleon) with fictional and uses scenarios that are fantastical distortions of contemporary reality. Hellenistic New Comedy, however, is based entirely around invented figures and (at least after Menander) set in a hazy, idealized version of the democratic city.

Comedy is thus one preimperial literary genre that consistently handles people and events that are—and are recognized by the audience as—entirely conjured from the author’s imagination. The boundaries between fictive and real worlds are constantly and knowingly traversed: for example, in the parabaseis of Aristophanic comedies (when the chorus steps aside and addresses the audience directly), or in the scene in the same poet’s Women at the Thesmophoria where interjections relating to the here and now punctuate Euripides’s and Mnesilochus’s attempts to conjure the world of Euripides’s Andromache.²¹ Another case is rhetoric: the scenarios of invented declamatory exercises (progymnasmata like Lucian’s Tyrannicide and Disowned), acted out by a speaker who adopts the persona of another (a prosecutor, defendant, or famous figure from the past), involve impersonation and make-believe.²² Both set-piece rhetoric and comic drama are indeed, as has long been acknowledged, key intertextual reference points for the imperial romance, invoked as literary precedents.²³

Whether such dramatic and rhetorical acting actually constitutes fiction, however, is a matter of definition. Certainly the reader is contracted into a willing suspension of belief concerning the text’s veracity, but that fictionality may be said to be a coefficient factor rather than central to the text’s purpose. Yet it pays, as we have already said, to remain aware that fiction is not an ontologically solid quality that either is or is not in a text. If (as I have claimed above) all literature contains an element of fictionality, then the history of fictionality is also the history of literature. That, clearly, is beyond the scope of a humble chapter, so for the present purposes, I will concentrate instead on narrative forms, particularly prose narrative. In fictional prose narrative, we might say, the fiction is embodied in the discourse itself rather than the performance. In drama and rhetorical logography, the founding untruth is perhaps the act of impersonating another: the fictionality flows from the brute disjunction between a performer with a real identity and the identity he claims. This is the case particularly, but not exclusively, when such texts are received through oral performance, a scenario that allows for complex disjunctural effects, such as in the famous case of the actor Polus, who carried his own son’s ashes when performing in Sophocles’s Electra.²⁴ Fictional narrative, however, operates in a very different way: there is no disjunction between true and false identities, because (with the partial exception of the author)²⁵ such texts contain no true identities at all. This distinction is, avowedly, slippery, especially when we accept that narrative forms sometimes may have been accessed through public recitation—that is, through a form of impersonation. But without wishing to shut off such avenues for future investigation, I shall for now keep the focus centrally on the fictional narrative book, which defines its fictionality in a distinctively absolutist and discursive way.

Epic and Fiction

Preimperial fiction, understood in this way, emerges not as a freestanding category but as an ontologically ambiguous subcategory of existing narrative forms. Of these, the most evident is traditional hexameter epic. I wish to turn now to consider briefly the reception of Hesiod and Homer from the classical into the Hellenistic period. Their poems became particular targets of scorn in the early classical period, when the so-called Ionian revolution shifted the burden of cosmic explanation from mythical narrative to physiological speculation. Xenophanes (early fifth century) mocks epic "inventions [plasmata]" about centaurs (fr. 1.22 DK) and naïve anthropomorphisms (frs. 13–14 West), chiding Homer and Hesiod for their depictions of divine immorality (frs. 10–11 West). Heraclitus too castigates his epic predecessors vigorously (frs. 42, 56–57, 105, 106 DK). This process of decentering the cultural authority of epic continued within the philosophical tradition, most notably in Plato’s famous critiques (in Ion and especially Republic II–III and X).

Much of the anxiety, as the above examples show, focused on the role of the gods, who were held to behave in ways that were either unbecoming or incredible.²⁶ For some ancient writers, the Homeric gods themselves were fictions. In a dramatic (perhaps satyric) fragment of the late fifth century, Critias or Euripides has Sisyphus claim that a shrewd and thoughtful man invented the gods, in order to terrify other humans into social conformity (fr. 19.11–13 TGrF). Whether this heretical belief was disproved later in the narrative we do not know, but it is clearly designed to reflect (or refract) contemporary Sophistic beliefs, mimicking the patterns of social-constructionist anthropological etiology elsewhere attributed to Prodicus and Protagoras.²⁷

This form of theological debunking is most fully realized in a Hellenistic text, the Sacred Inscription attributed to Euhemerus of Messene (early third century B.C.E.; discussed more fully in Imaginary Worlds below and in chapter 3), which survives principally in summary via books 5 and 6 of Diodorus of Sicily.²⁸ The author claims to have visited the Panchaean Islands (supposedly off the eastern coast of Arabia), where he saw a golden pillar inscribed with the deeds of Uranus, Cronos, and Zeus, three Panchaean kings (Diod. Sic. 6.1.7–10). The Greek gods were, it transpires, originally historical mortals, who were accounted gods because of Zeus’s great achievements. As I argue more fully in chapter 3, the Euhemeran narrative predicates its sense of its own status as a fictional text on a knowing, intellectualized tradition of commentary on Homeric and Hesiodic misrepresentations, particularly of the gods.

This kind of fiction thus emerges as reflexive rather than autonomous, nesting as it does in the periphery of the epic tradition. The Sacred Inscription is in one sense the least Euhemeristic of such mythological rationalizations, if we take that label to point to the careful sanitization of traditional myth so as to exclude implausible elements.²⁹ It does not deal at all, so far as we can tell, with the explication of Homeric and Hesiodic narrative; the travels of Zeus related on the inscription proper are not presented as the kernel of truth underlying traditional mythology. But there were plenty of other writers engaged in the project of stripping away poetic embellishment. Already in the celebrated opening of Herodotus we find the stories of the thefts of Europa, Helen, Medea, and Io presented in a pared-down, realistic mode (1.2.1–1.5.2). In an equally famous passage, Thucydides scales back the Greek expedition to Troy, arguing that while it may have been the largest up to that point, it was considerably smaller than anything in his own time (1.10). Significantly, Thucydides here makes mention of the principle of poetic exaggeration: "It is likely that, being a poet, he [Homer] adorned [kosmēsai] his poetry with a view to magnification [epi to meizon] (1.10.3; see too the following section). This is an early example of the prose position statement," marking the rivalry between prose and verse as veridical genres.³⁰

Herodotus and Thucydides were aiming at communicating a type of truth—even if, in Herodotus’s case at least (see the following section), in a strikingly polyphonic medium. We cannot, however, assume this of all such rationalists. It is extremely difficult to assess the tone of, for example, Palaephatus (possibly fourth century B.C.E.), whose jejune narrative style and simplistic procedure can, depending on one’s vantage, seem either naïve or ludic:

They say that Diomedes’s mares were man-eating. How laughable! Horses eat hay and barley, not human flesh. The truth is as follows. In ancient times, people labored for themselves and got food and wealth by working the land themselves. But one man started to rear horses. He took pleasure in these horses up until the point when he lost his possessions. He sold them all and used the money to feed his horses, so his friends started to call these horses man-eating. That is was happened, and the myth was generated thereby. (7)

The word laughable discloses the stakes: what version of the story we choose to believe will determine whether we laugh with or are laughed at. But is this radical banalization of the Diomedes legend not in itself ludicrous? Certainly the pretext has something of an Old Comedy plot about it: Aristophanes’s Clouds, notably, centers on the ruinous state of the household thanks to Pheidippides’s obsession with horses. But while it is always attractive to posit a hypersophisticated, self-deconstructive motive that will rescue a text like this from its own apparent inconsequentiality, there are no explicit triggers: it is invariably possible to read Palaephatus, as indeed most people have, as a simple monomaniac. Yet as I have hinted above and argue at greater length in chapter 3, the Sacred Inscription seems different: there is every reason to believe that the original text was avowedly and playfully fictional. This seems to go too for the work of Euhemerus’s successor Dionysius Scytobrachion (The leather arm), who in the second century B.C.E. composed prose versions of the Argonautic and Trojan events shorn of mythological apparatus.³¹ In both cases,